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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

Is there a single filesystem in the world (besides "simple" ones like FAT) that both has an open standard AND is licensed in a "usable" codebase (MIT or other "non-copyleft" license)?

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I think UDF was meant to be this, though I don't think it supports everything you'd want. Does NTFS have licensing issues though?

NTFS has serious performance issues, nobody should use it.

AFAIK that's an incorrect meme that just won't die. The performance issues you're thinking of have nothing to do with the filesystem itself, but with the I/O subsystem in Windows more generally. If you have evidence otherwise please share.

Microsoft itself admits there are performance issues with NTFS, which is one reason they created ReFS.

For example ReFS removed the MFT which caused various problems.

I'm on my phone and this is a longer discussion than I can have here, but the performance problems they're thinking of and the ones people usually rant about on these forums are not the same ones (or same magnitude). Before being so confident it's NTFS itself that's the issue, try ReFS (and FAT32 for that matter) and tell me if you see the performance problems you've encountered actually improve a lot. And then narrow down the cause. You might be surprised how much of it had to do e.g. with filter drivers or other things. And don't forget you're still testing one particular implementation on one OS, which doesn't say anything about a different one for the same filesystem on a different OS.

I have been running ReFS for many years now on all but the system partition. But for reliability/self-heal reasons.

The MFT was annoying because if you create 1 mil files, and the delete them, the MFT will not be shrunk back.

> I have been running ReFS for many years now on all but the system partition. But for reliability/self-heal reasons.

Have you ever benchmarked it against NTFS? With the same exact set of FS filter drivers running on both? How much does the performance differ?

There are tools like voidtools Everything2 and WizTree that directly read NTFS from disk device bypassing windows FS apis and are blazingly fast (faster than find/du on ext4 in Linux).

'Everything' is caching all the files in memory and indexing them. Completely different than find/du on Linux.

zfs?

correct. but it's also a management system so perhaps they only want a files system? no idea why more don't use zfs. especially after the auto expansion update earlier in the year.

IMO the main reason is that ~90% of ZFS benefits only show up with multiple drives which (unfortunately) is fairly uncommon outside of servers.

That's a major benefit of ZFS for sure, but I think being copy on write is another major benefit for single disk systems. ZFS is the only one I know of that has a full feature set and is supported on every major OS.

Cross platform encryption, backup/restore (zfs send/receive), large file support are all great reasons to use zfs.

Apple almost went with ZFS and Sun pissed off Jobs by mentioning it early (IIRC).

Not AFAICT.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17852019

xfs.

if GPL is a non-starter for you, youre missing the point of the open standard. apple already discloses a litany of various GPL it ships. XFS would be no different.

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